Artifact Details

Title

Catalog Number

Type

Text

Date

2002-11-12

Contributor

Johnson, Luanne, Interviewer; Editor

Mann, James L. (Jim), Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Wayne, Pennsylvania

Extent

23 p.

Description

In this interview, James L. "Jim" Mann discusses his forty-eight year career in the computer software and services industry beginning with a sales position at IBM in 1960 and ending as Chair of SunGard, a multi-billion dollar company specializing in financial accounting software and disaster recovery services. He describes his early career running a small service bureau in the Midwest and developing and franchising tax return computation software called DynaTax. That business was merged with four other service bureaus and Mann was chosen to manage the resulting company, Dynafacts. He then merged Dynafacts with United Data Centers in 1972 and was involved in the acquisition of United Data Centers by Tymshare in 1974. Following a hiatus from the computer services industry, he became Chief Operating Officer of Bradford National Corporation in New York City until he was tapped by venture capitalists to run SunGard when it was spun off of Sun Oil Company. He describes the strategies including 147 acquisitions (as of 2009) that built SunGard into a major software and services company.